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Casamance a magical part of Senegal but independence war has taken its toll: Porter

Casamance is this country’s version of Newfoundland: a distant cousin with a funny accent that everyone adores, but makes fun of.

Catherine Porter's children, Lyla, second from right, and Noah, left, spent an afternoon playing with young kids in the fishing village of Pointe St. Georges, Casamance. Their friend Elijah Marche, in yellow, joined them from Canada. (Catherine Porter / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A dug-out canoe rests on the beach of Pointe St. Georges in Casamance, Senegal. (Catherine Porter / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

POINTE ST. GEORGES, SENEGAL — Twenty-five families live in this village, on a bump in the wide Casamance River.

To get here, we first took the overnight ferry from Dakar to Ziguinchor, the crumbling colonial capital of Casamance.

We were greeted in the morning by dolphins, bursting from the water in the boat’s wake.

Already, we knew we’d come to a magical place.

Early the next morning, when the river glowed purple with promise, we pushed off in a long wooden motorboat and retraced our route down the river towards the Atlantic.

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Casamance is this country’s version of Newfoundland: a distant cousin with a funny accent that everyone adores, but makes fun of. It is separated from the rest of Senegal by a whole other country, The Gambia.

While most of the country is Muslim, many people here are animist and Christian. While most of the country is brittle and dust-caked, Casamance is lush and tropical.

And while Senegal is known around West Africa as the beacon of peace and stability, this province has been at war for independence for thirty years now.

But, you wouldn’t know it.

We puttered along the river, embraced by mangroves. A pink cloud of flamingoes appeared in the distance.

After two hours, the village’s wide beach opened before us, framed by palm trees and dotted with blue-clawed crabs and rough dugout canoes.

A fisherman stood beside one, cleaning out the net from his midnight round of shrimping. We were too late for the manatees, he said. They are best seen in early morning or late afternoon. No matter, we could wander through the village and pay someone to cook us lunch.

That’s what we did, weaving between the mud, straw-roofed houses and the ripening mango trees. Baby goats and pigs scattered about, and soon enough, we were a parade of little kids, all wanting to hold my children’s hands.

We stopped at a brick building. It had many empty rooms and two grand curved staircases.

It was a relic from the war: a former community-run hotel, called a campement, that used to burst with tourists.

“This used to be like Saint-Tropez,” a man named Gigi said over the lunch of fresh shrimp his wife cooked for us. “People came here for vacations from Paris. Everyone in the village used to work for the tourism industry.”

There was even an airplane landing strip on the edge of the village, he said.

That all ended with the war.

Unlike other separatist wars in Africa, the one in Casamance has been contained and relatively bloodless – only 5,000 victims over three decades. But, unlike the other wars, it has dwindled, unceasing. Fighting that peaked in the mid 1990s is largely over, but rebels continue to operate in the forests.

Pointe St. George’s was the first burnt-out, abandoned campement of many we’d see.

“You are a journalist?” a wood carver later asked me. “Please tell people it’s safe here now, and they should come back.”

By mid afternoon, the tide was high and our boat was no longer beached. We said goodbye to the kids and swam out to it.

As we pulled away, we saw something moving in the water. It wasn’t manatees. It was two men.

They swam up, pulled their faces over the wooden rim to inspect our cargo, and satisfied by our driver’s responses, waved us on.

I laughed at the sight of them swimming away. In all my years of travel, I have never been stopped by soldiers in swimsuits. But there was something creepy here too.

It was another incongruous reminder that this sleepy, tropical paradise is in fact, a sleepy war zone.

Catherine Porter is a Star columnist who has gone on leave for a year to live in Dakar, Senegal. She writes about her adventures each week. She can be reached at catherine_porter@rogers.com . You can follow her daily snapshots on Twitter @porterthereport.

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